Design and evaluation of the electronic sensing system of Rehapiano

This paper describes the development of a data acquisition system for the Rehapiano device, that is designed for diagnosis and rehabilitation of the fine motor skills impairments of upper extremities. Rehapiano measures the forces exerted by the fingers and enables to apply the principles of intelligent and adaptive rehabilitation. We introduce the reader to the benefits of intelligent rehabilitation and describe the similar state-of-the-art devices based on various sensors, namely active stereo-vision camera, force transducer, and inertial measurement unit. We describe the development of a data acquisition system for load cells, the mechanical, hardware, firmware, and software parts of the device. We have performed verification experiments to determine the ability of Rehapiano to detect finger tremors with various frequencies. Finger tremors are indicative, for example, in diagnosing Parkinson’s disease. We performed frequency domain analysis on acquired data to detect dominant frequency and concluded that the device is capable to detect frequencies of Parkinson’s tremor.